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In the States, the ‘cult of celebrity’ poses a far greater toxic phenomenon than it does in this country. We tolerate fame while Americans positively revere it. To them it is a religion. And mega-fame, just like worshipping the gods, requires a giant leap of faith and an unassailable devotion by those that choose to bask in its reflected glory. It can mean selling your soul to the devil. Celebrities are elevated to such dizzy heights that they are encouraged to become an alien race that is allowed to dwell in a parallel world. A surreal and Disneyfied universe which comes with an unchecked and ungovernable compass of normality. They all too often inhabit a world devoid of barriers. They may be shielded from their adoring public and the omnipresent paparazzi by bodyguards, and travel with cavalcades of armed police to protect them from danger, yet superstars seem wilfully oblivious to the fact that their biggest threat is probably languishing on their payroll. Personal ‘physicians to the stars’ are often just licensed enablers. They’re drug-pushers who seem conveniently to have forgotten — despite years of medical training — their allegiance to the Hippocratic Oath.
Did Dr Conrad Murray, the 56-year-old cardiologist at Michael Jackson’s bedside the night he died, ever pause to remember that he once solemnly promised to ‘neither give a deadly drug to anyone if asked for it, nor make a suggestion to this effect’, or did he just assume this vow came with a caveat that specifically excluded celebrities? His professional judgment was patently so warped by the seductive demands of a frail superstar (coupled with the allure of a fat monthly pay-check) he just rolled over and capitulated, much like poor Jackson himself. The only discernible difference in an overdose privately administered in Bel-Air to one injected in a back alley in the Bronx is the cloak of phoney respectability that accompanies the former. The poor take drugs; the rich are medicated. It may sound better to be ‘medicated’ than to score on the streets, but doctors who have stars in their eyes are still just glorified drug-pushers.
I’m all in favour of occasionally paying for preferential, fast-tracked medical treatment. It’s a personal choice. A private GP who is willing to come out in the middle of the night to deal with an emergency is an undeniable luxury; yet the mellifluous bedside manner that was accorded to recent high-profile victims such as Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith turned out to be dangerously murky. The dubious kudos of tending to these troubled, high-maintenance souls seems to have totally impaired and anaesthetised these (presumably) once-honourable medicine men and turned them into charlatans incapable of practising anything other than quackery. They’re not proper doctors; they’re just fame junkies who have crossed the moral Rubicon to prey on the weak, vulnerable, demanding and über-rich. Overmedicating and pandering to patients — no matter who they are — is a prescription we must all live without.
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